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The Lounge is rated PG. If you're about to post something you wouldn't want your
kid sister to read then don't post it. No flame wars, no abusive conduct, no programming
questions and please don't post ads.

That look is nothing to do with the CCC. The sheep are in his garden again...

Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DDEthel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett

I think you'll find Griff's problem with sheep in the garden is that they got out of the house.

Panic, Chaos, Destruction. My work here is done.Drink. Get drunk. Fall over - P O'H
OK, I will win to day or my name isn't Ethel Crudacre! - DDEthel Crudacre
I cannot live by bread alone. Bacon and ketchup are needed as well. - Trollslayer
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb - they're often *students*, for heaven's sake - Terry Pratchett

My wife bought a cover / keyboard thing for her iPad yesterday, and being bored I read the manual, which has been very entertainingly translated - somewhere Chinesey I think.

My personal favourite line is;

Note: When you normally using the keyboard, or if you are not using the keyboard and didn't urn off the power switch, please don't fold or curly, so you will have been working at the keyboard, it will greatly decrease you using the keyboard.

At one point it also tells you to "Turn Jon the toggle switch". I like the personal touch of giving the controls names.

Every man can tell how many goats or sheep he possesses, but not how many friends.

Then you should see the next step of the translation: From English to other langages (like Swedish)!
I often meet people saying "I'm an idiot, I don't understand the manual".
They arn't idiots, the manual is completely useless.
The English version usually is comprehensible to a certain extent. So it's the best option, for what it's worth.

Alcohol. The cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson

Sounds like every day for me. I usually work 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., alloting 2 hours for my lunchtime run/workout. That stretch from 6:00 to around 8:30 is as productive as the rest of the entire day. No walk-ins, no phone calls, little e-mail after dealing with the overnight batch, and the coffee is freely flowing.

I work four days a week doing 9 am to 7 pm.
1. Four 10-hour days are much better than five 8-hour days.
2. In am in the US at the moment and they all seem to LOVE coming in at 7 am or 8 am at the latest so they can leave at 3 or 4 pm.
3. It gets very quiet around 3-4 pm so I get 3-4 really productive hours in wonderful peace and quiet!
4. One of my days is a Sunday and so I can take Tuesday & Wednesday off as a mid-week weekend. Sunday is a whole day of peace and quiet - I get about twice as much done on Sunday as on any other day as nobody at all is in for the whole day (usually).
5. I miss most of the traffic rush hours in the morning and evening because of my later hours.

- Life in the fast lane is only fun if you live in a country with no speed limits.
- Of all the things I have lost, it is my mind that I miss the most.
- I vaguely remember having a good memory...

The scheme worked very well for Bob. In his performance assessments by the firm's human resources department, he was the firm's top coder for many quarters and was considered expert in C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, and Python.

From the Article:

Further investigation found that the enterprising Bob had actually taken jobs with other firms and had outsourced that work too, netting him hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit as well as lots of time...

Bob is my hero!

My programming get away... The Blog...
Taking over the world since 1371!

Apparently Bob was working on "critical applications" which clearly was intended to mean "classified applications." He could be in violation of the OSA or one of its derivatives; certainly having a resident of a foreign country, much less China with its general lack of respect for other people's technical secrets, working on anything that could be classified as "critical" without even the tacit consent of his management makes his termination from employment the LEAST of the consequences of this stupidity. I expect the security establishment will be very busy ruining his peace of mind for some time to come.

"Seize the day" - Horace

"It's not what he doesn't know that scares me; it's what he knows for sure that just ain't so!" - Will Rogers, said by him about Herbert Hoover

Only problem is that he was fundamentally lying to his company. He let unknown foreign hackers have his login credentials, even shipping them a hardware security token. It's not a surprise the company were miffed to find unknown people on their network, looking at their proprietary code (and who knows what else). C'mon, this was an outrageous breach of trust. This guy ought to go to jail.

Even if you think Bob was a hero, if anything had gone wrong (foreign hackers being what they are) Bob would have been in some deep legal doo-doo.

I think if Bob were smarter this could be entirely avoided. All Bob needed to do was allow them to login to his computer, which had access to his work and would have prevented the logs from showing access from China. They would not need his security token that way as well. It's pretty amazing that he even kept the transactions on his work email as well.

I've been surprised at how mildly everyone is viewing this. It's like folks think he's clever for gaming the system.

If this guy had worked for me, there would be a black, glassy crater where his cubicle used to be. The lazy motherf***** defrauded me in the most basic terms of his employment contract. Worse, he opened my internal network to an outside agency.

Not only would I have terminated his employment, I would have filed a criminal complaint against him and sought civil penalties as well.

I hired him for the skills he advertised in his resume/CV and presented during his interview. Having another person/company do the work, without explicitly stating that up front, is misrepresentation and fraudulent.

Fair enough, but then would you have a problem if the guy took the time to verify everything then?

I just guess personally, I don't think I'd care as long as the work was getting done correctly and in a timely fashion for the amount of money I was willing to pay. Issues of security (opening the VPN to a third party) and IP (presumably he gave them complete access to the product's source code to do the work...especially in a country like China that tends to disregard foreign IP as it sees fit) would be concerning though.

Agreed, the contract is I pay you and this gets done to an acceptable quality. So long as that's being met it doesn't matter if you outsource or not. It's similar to a company outsourcing, then finding that the company they outsourced to uses contractors - not a problem so long as the inputs and outputs of the black box meet the requirements of the contract.

The security argument is valid and probably goes against the company's guidelines so gives them a good case for fair dismissal.

The guy losing his job isn't so bad; sounds like he's earnt enough to do OK for himself and he'll now probably set up a software development company of his own.

I disagree. If the employer paid him to come to work and get busy and spend eight hours a day in the treadmill, the employer is stupid. If the employer paid him just to get the work done, the employer is reasonable. And that's exactly what Bob did - getting the job done.

I too think the only issues to consider are those of IP/confidentiality/security. If Bob wasn't working on security-sensitive code, I'd say there wasn't anything he did wrong.

And also, even if I'm making a living writing code myself, I consider most code not to be worth not opening (although my employer thinks otherwise). The the companies I write code for don't actually derive value from the code I write for them by selling it, the code is just a tool allowing them to provide a service for which they get paid. The tool is most often so specialized that other companies wouldn't be in a good position to use it anyway. If it's a tool I build, without somebody using it it's worthless. If I find a way to provide my customer with a better tool at a lower cost, should he be angry at me?

You hire a specific guy to work for you. You interview him. You get to look at him. You know how he dresses, what he drives. Maybe go out for drinks with him and his wife. you KNOW him. It's why you trust him. It's why you give him login credentials for your internal network. It's why you let him in the office where all that expensive computing gear is kept. It's why you tell him your secret business plans for world domination.

You keep a lock on your office door because you don't want just anybody in there. You don't just put up a banner ad that says, "I've put a description of my business plans, my credit card database, and a subversion archive on this server. Come in and write code, but don't steal anything please."

Even now, those companies have no idea how exposed they were. Maybe all they got was code. Maybe Chinese hackers downloaded their whole network and are even now preparing to offer the same service for less money.

You get this in all walks of employment. Hiring a construction company to do work will get you a contractor with some of his own workers and specialties, and several sub contractors he hires. Many times the people you hire never do any actual work, it's all subs.

+5
I'm suprised I had to read this far into the comments to see this reality check.

And what about the bigger picture? We're in the middle of a cyber esionage war with China right now. Any IP he had access to, that was of any interest to the Chinese military, can be assumed to be in their hands now. If it were my company, I'd be digging through every log I had to see what IP he gave to them.

We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.